THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)

  • 28 Mar 2024, 06:55
  • Welcome, Guest
Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: [1]   Go Down

Author Topic: Vista  (Read 6389 times)

est

  • this is a test
  • Admin emeritus
  • Older than Moses
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4,157
  • V O L L E Y B A L L
Vista
« on: 01 Mar 2007, 16:38 »

Ok people, I have seen a lot of bad-mouthing of Vista around here and other places, so I am starting a thread to talk about it!  Is it just because it is newest and most bloated of the Windows family?  Does anyone actually have some non-biased opinions based on usage of the OS, or are the complaints I am seeing mostly based on speculation and conjecture or from something you've read elsewhere?  If so, links plz omg.

Here's the official recommended specs:

    * An 800 MHz processor
    * 512 MB of RAM
    * A 20 GB hard drive with 15 GB of free space

The main gripes I am hearing are people claiming Vista needs 2gb ram to run, the security thing (ie: it treats you like even more of an idiot than XP already does), you need a super-duper graphics card to run it and that there are driver problems.

The ram thing: Heather ran a late beta of Vista on her old PC with an Athlon XP 2100+ and 512mb ram and it worked ok before her hdd failed (unrelated hardware problem)

The security thing: You can turn that shit off, and I will.

The graphics card thing: You can turn the new graphics off, in fact it does it for you automatically if your card isn't up to the job.

The drivers: It's a brand new OS.  It takes a while for hardware manufacturers to give updates for their drivers.  It isn't MS's fault if your hardware manufacturer hasn't provided new drivers yet.


I guess what I am saying is that this happens every single time a new OS comes out.  I can remember people having a shit attack about XP, but it is easily the best Windows OS, at least for home users.  Windows ME was a pile of crap, but apart from that exception each successive Windows release has improved upon the previous iteration.

I am not standing here saying Vista is awesome, it's just another OS.  Maybe it's better than XP, maybe it's a step backward.  But let's talk about it sensibly rather than throwing out hyperbole and hearsay.
Logged

est

  • this is a test
  • Admin emeritus
  • Older than Moses
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4,157
  • V O L L E Y B A L L
Re: Vista
« Reply #1 on: 01 Mar 2007, 16:41 »

So ok, after all that my take on any new Windows OS is to wait about 6 mths after release before checking it out seriously.  It gives the hardware manufacturers time to get their drivers in order, and there may even be an SP1 by that time.  This is probably what I am gonna do with Vista, but it depends on when I get to upgrade my PC.  My PC is pretty old (Athlon XP 2500+, 1gb ram).  I am pretty sure it'd run Vista, but I am already going to be upgrading fairly soon (fingers crossed).  If I am going to go to the trouble of a reinstall then I may as well wait until I have new hardware and have to reinstall anyway, y'know?
Logged

JJMitchell

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #2 on: 01 Mar 2007, 16:44 »

Here is an article the really made me wonder if it would be worth it.

Basically he says that all the new features might be 'nice' but not enough to make him want to upgrade.  He has been using it for 19 months.

I'm not saying I'll never upgrade but why would I put myself through needing to spend money on it and driver issues, especially with games when the features it adds aren't all that?
Logged

Liz

  • Older than Moses
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4,483
  • Nuclear Bomb Tits
    • Last.fm
Re: Vista
« Reply #3 on: 01 Mar 2007, 16:47 »

I have Vista and I prefer it over XP, really. Mainly it just looks a heck of a lot better- the design beats XP on so many different levels. Also, I have 1 GB ram and it runs even better than my old computer with XP and the same amount of ram. Really I'm not that technical, though, so basically the aesthetics are good. As long as it runs well and I like it, I'm satisfied.

There are a lot of security warnings, I will admit, but I leave them there. They make me feel safe.
Logged
Quote from: John
Liz is touching me.
Quote from: Bryan
Fuck you, I want him so bad.

Melodic

  • Only pretending to work
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2,115
  • archive chin panties
Re: Vista
« Reply #4 on: 01 Mar 2007, 16:53 »

As an avid computer gamer, I'm going to be waiting until the next big game comes out that is Vista-exclusive, and for that reason I really do hope Crysis gets delayed a couple of months. In ideal conditions, I want to upgrade my video card when I upgrade to Vista, and I want ATi to unleash their DX10 cards before I'm forced into purchasing a next-gen GPU.
Logged
And if you played too hard it'd flop out and dangle around by the wire and that is just super ugly

Scytale

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #5 on: 01 Mar 2007, 23:46 »

I'm pretty much a Linux convert so I'm not going to use Vista on my PC's anytime in the future, but I've just been given the task of investigating porting over  a whole lot of OGS control room software at work to a windows platform, so I'm probably going to have to get aquainted with it in the near future, or at least whatever the server edition of Vista is called.

My 2 big complaints about it are the DRM restrictions, which are complete crap and the lack of fine-grained control it gives you over the computers hardware, which probably isn't going to be a huge deal for the average user.

The other big thing, which Microsoft must be kicking themselves about is Vista not shipping with the new shell (MSH), having a shell that can leverage the .NET libraries is a really awesome idea, especially given WSH's  piss poor regular expression support etc. The scripting lanuage it uses looks pretty nifty as well like a combination of BASH and C#, for me its a must have if you're going to be admining a windows box. I'd reccomend anyone running Vista at the moment download it from MSDN, if they haven't allready, it's seriously one of the coolest things Microsoft has come up with in a while.

So I guess my conclusion is if you're prepared to pay the money for it and you don't really care about DRM then yeah go for it, otherwise stick with XP.
Logged

öde

  • Vulcan 3-D Chess Master
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3,633
Re: Vista
« Reply #6 on: 02 Mar 2007, 13:56 »

My only problem with Vista is that if I got it I'd void a load of stuff by disabling all the crap I don't like.

Reminds me of the thing I hated most in XP, you didn't have 'permission' to stop certain processes.
Logged

Jenno

  • Furry furrier
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 169
Re: Vista
« Reply #7 on: 02 Mar 2007, 20:25 »

I have 2 problems ruining Vista for me at the moment.

1. Nvidia drivers at the moment are basically just plain shit, this goes for the nforce4 ones and the graphics ones. I am having so many issues with these that I've moved back to XP for all gaming. The nforce4 raid support is basically non-existent in Vista as well, which made it a bit of a pain to install.

2. The security warnings are way too frequent and invasive, I feel that by flashing the whole screen and annoying the fuck out of me I'm becoming desensitised to the dialog and just clicking through out of instinct. The security dialogs also spawn for the most mundane shit, this is something that Microsoft should have just copied verbatim from Mac OS X because the Vista way of doing it is really frustrating for the user.

Apart from that, all is peachy.
Logged

Scytale

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #8 on: 03 Mar 2007, 04:09 »

if you want to complain about Nvidia drivers try running Linux...

I've had so many issues with Kmod-Nvidia in the past including one that wouldn't let me boot into run level 5 arrghh...
Logged

Jenno

  • Furry furrier
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 169
Re: Vista
« Reply #9 on: 05 Mar 2007, 02:01 »

Weirdly enough, the linux drivers have always worked great for me.  :laugh:
Logged

Scytale

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #10 on: 05 Mar 2007, 04:33 »

Oh don't get me started gaah, video card has been the least of my troubles.

I was trying to setup my server at home, I had bought a stupid VIA chipset (yeah I know my mistake, it was the cheapest Raid 5 board I could find, never buying anything with their chipsets in it again ever..), There were no kernel drivers for the SATA raid controller and since I didn't have a PATA drive to spare I couldn't even install about four different distros on it, I ended up having to install Gentoo on it, gah I do not see what the appeal of Gentoo is took me about 5 hours to download and compile everything just to find out that the kernel wouldn't run if when tried to load Via's drivers into it, turns out there was a typo in one of their header files I'm banging my head on the desk in frustration and about 8 or 9 hours have passed now. Finally get the thing up and running and then about three weeks later the board dies, just like that, damn near broke my heart...

So to keep this on topic,  when it's 3 in the morning and your hunting through you're uni notes on how bitfields work in C trying to work out why the Fscking (haha lame attmept at unix humor there) driver won't compile. Then you wish you just went out and bought a copy of Windows 2003 server edition or whatever its called, if you want a computer thats nice to you works with damn near any hardware you can buy and aren't worried about cost, security etc then go for it, much much nicer then the alternative (unless you did some reading in advance and have some nice hardware, then the alternative actually works...).
Logged

dennis

  • Asleep in the boner patch
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 776
  • A sockful of quarters makes the medicine go down.
    • Lies! Truth!
Re: Vista
« Reply #11 on: 11 Mar 2007, 04:23 »

The problem with Linux isn't actually Linux's fault.

You have to buy hardware for Linux, not the other way around.

Of course, this leaves in the lurch a lot of people who have poorly/un supported hardware who want to switch. Luckily, because it's open source, the community writes drivers for the hardware they have.
Logged

jmrz

  • Beyoncé
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 715
  • zomg pale
    • flickr
Re: Vista
« Reply #12 on: 11 Mar 2007, 04:49 »

I spent a good few hours trying to get things to work on vista today. Both my sister and my best friend's new laptops came with vista pre-installed. If they weren't HP then I would be reformatting them straight back to XP. I have had troubles with getting them to network nicely with XP machines, with programs that are used on a regular basis and with getting Vista too look nice, not be annoying, and behave itself.

Overall opinion = customised XP all the way.
Logged
Quote from: Daniel on Gabbly
princy, this is the time to think with your vagina
Quote from: Iananan on Gabbly
nipples are deactivated at birth, to prevent misfires and accident

Scytale

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #13 on: 11 Mar 2007, 04:57 »

Dennis:

You're almost right in that regard, the big things with hardware though is the manufactures have to be willing to help the community out, Intel is a really good company in this regard, other companies, like ATI well aren't. If the companies won't release specifications on how their hardware works it's upto smart people to reverse engineer things, which is a lot harder then it sounds.

A good example is wireless network adapters, most wireless chipsets are poorly supported or need really buggy binary drivers, which taint the kernel and pose big security risks, you have to be very selective when you purchase a wireless adapter and unfortunately this means that most laptops have trouble with wireless (I've notice the 2.6.20 kernel has had some pretty big work done to it's wireless stack so it should be interesting to see how this pans out). Sometimes I almost feel like switching to Open BSD as the developers there seem to have a much better standing on binary drivers (banned outright).


Logged

nihilist

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #14 on: 13 Mar 2007, 11:16 »

Well, I've been running Vista on my laptop (P-M 1.6, 1GB RAM, ATI 9000) for about two months now.  After I turned UAC off, I was much happier.  Sure, I don't get the fancy interface (ATI 9000, remember?), but it is smooth and fast.  Going into standby mode is stupidly fast, hibernation isn't much longer.  Shit loads fast, shit runs, I'm happy.

Not putting it on my workstation for about six months, though.  There are still some things that haven't been updated to play nice with Vista, though I don't know why.  You've had five fucking years notice that it was coming out.  Also, my workstation has a nVidia SLI in it; no fucking way am I touching those drivers.
Logged

Coming Home

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #15 on: 15 Mar 2007, 17:08 »

I like Vista a whole lot more than XP.
It doesn't go, "HURR! I WILL CRASH BECAUSE YOU USE THE INTERNETS!"
Overall, I think it's pretty cool. And darkish.
Logged

The Cosmic Fool

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #16 on: 15 Mar 2007, 20:18 »

It probably doesn't crash because there isn't anything on it to make it crash. Any hardcore PC users probably haven't switched to it yet. So Vista is probably running more Office software than anything else.


I've used it. Here are my thoughts:

Pros:

- The new GUI is slick. I like it. Unfortunatly, people often never change their desktops from Luna in XP. Those who did got sick of it and knowledgeable enough to spend some time doing it. Vista might kill off the skinning community because I can see more people sticking to Aero than ever before. Plus, it's not going to get old anytime soon. Nice work, skinners at MS. Or nice theft. Either way.

- I like how they reorganized some stuff. Now, when you select a wallpaper, you can load up multiple directories. So if you have a wallpaper folder outside of "My Pictures" you can finally pick one while seeing all of your wallpapers in your own folder. Another thing that I like is the new Explorer shell, and the enhanced search function. You can pretty much search for any file and find it in no time.

- More secure. This is mainly not for myself. But I'll be happier knowing that it's going to take alot more than inept computer users to screw something up. It makes your first account a "standard user" and then you need to make an administrator. It's alot like Linux in this regard. But this should make computers break a little less because idiots won't be able to fuck something up without putting a password in first or the system letting them know something is wrong. Vista is XP for people who don't know how to use a computer. Good stuff, MS.

Cons:

- Nothing works. Yet. The drivers, while getting better leave your computer (or at least mine) in a state of disarray. This isn't exactly MS' fault. But I still don't like it. Expect Vista and all your applications to run better once your video drivers get good. I've noticed a jump or two in speed since I updated my own. Biggest reason why to stay with XP for a bit.

- RAM. Two things. It uses about 500mb of RAM on any given time. (If you don't believe me, explain why my physical memory is sitting at 50%) And it freely uses your swap on bootup. It doesn't wait for you run out of RAM and then dive into your swap. It just takes out a chunk whenever it feels like it. Unless you have 2gb of RAM, I'm not recommending Vista.

Also, if you go into Task Manager and look at how much free RAM you have, it will probably tell you that you have like 3mb there. Want to know where it's going? Vista controls your RAM. Unlike XP where RAM would just sit there freely until you loaded something up, Vista actually takes all of your RAM right away and does things with that RAM. It begins to get intuitive and the programs you use more often will inevitably load up faster. It's smart, and some people might praise it...but I don't know where the hell it's going to. I haven't found anything that tells me what it's doing with the x amount of RAM that I'm not using. There are a few articles on the internet that explain this RAM thing better than I do.

- I'm very unhappy they remade the kernel. This means that every single software developer has to make a Vista version for everything they produce from now on. Compatibility mode is fine, but I refuse to accept that they just had to make it different. So all the XP software probably won't work on Vista natively without compatibility mode. Fucking jerks.
Logged

Fiddler

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #17 on: 16 Mar 2007, 11:09 »

You all have the pro's and con's of Vista down pretty well so I'm not going to critique it too much.  What I will say is that there is something really cool you can do with Vista thanks to its new installation procedure.  You can get a couple gig USB drive and set it up so the computer will recognize it as a boot drive and then just transfer the entire Vista install onto it.  After that, you can use the Windows Automated Installation Kit to make it so that the entire thing is a silent install with no user input required.  After that you just boot the computer off the plugged in USB and it installs in under 5 minutes.  Which if you've had to sit through as many XP installs as I have, that is frickin amazing.
Logged

jmrz

  • Beyoncé
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 715
  • zomg pale
    • flickr
Re: Vista
« Reply #18 on: 16 Mar 2007, 16:01 »

That is a major plus for Vista. One of the things that I didn't like about Vista, and I guess it is just because I have been set in XP for so long. Is the way the Start Menu works. If you want it to look nice and work like the XP start menu etc, and pop out of the side I could just not find a way to make that happen. Can it be done without reverting to Windows Classic theme?
Logged
Quote from: Daniel on Gabbly
princy, this is the time to think with your vagina
Quote from: Iananan on Gabbly
nipples are deactivated at birth, to prevent misfires and accident

Scytale

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #19 on: 16 Mar 2007, 19:49 »


- I'm very unhappy they remade the kernel. This means that every single software developer has to make a Vista version for everything they produce from now on. Compatibility mode is fine, but I refuse to accept that they just had to make it different. So all the XP software probably won't work on Vista natively without compatibility mode. Fucking jerks.

I wasn't even aware this was an issue, we run XP at work, probably will make the switch eventually. Most stuff I write is in C and runs completely separate to the OS, but from about 2 weeks ago I've been doing a lot of C++, trying to build a common user interface for a lot of the process models we use at work, for the GUI stuff I used wxWidgets for so thats os - independent, but I've been using a lot of native MS DLL's and things for stuff like Database access, I just naively assumed it was going to work on all future versions of Windows. Is stuff like ADO broken or changed in Vista? What ODBC, are their Oracle drivers for Vista yet? I hadn't even thought about this, this is a pretty huge project and that post of your has almost scared me enough to start using Java.

On a (slightly) related note: Does anyone know if theres any software for Windows that does automatic dependency resoloution, similar to RPM or something like that in the Linux world, my project needs certain DLL's to be installed to work and in some cases certain versions as well, it would be good if I could write an "installer" that checks all this beforehand.
Logged

The Cosmic Fool

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #20 on: 16 Mar 2007, 20:53 »

I'm not a programmer. So it might be best to ask one of the programmers on here. I do know however that the kernel is different. It's a hybrid kernel. And on Vista, I've had some successes with XP programs and some only work in compatibility mode. As far as I know, XP was just a remastered NT. People were worried when XP shipped that no games would work because few games it seemed worked on the Windows 2000, NT, etc. They ended up working fine. Games and programs that refused to run on 2000 worked on XP.

It remains to be seen what Vista is based off. Visually it looks like XP, keeping similar characteristics. But I think MS changed alot under the hood. Or at least enough to make some programs not work automatically. Like I said again, I'm not sure. But that is my best guess.

Logged

Scytale

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #21 on: 16 Mar 2007, 21:10 »

You scared me for a second:

the NT kernel (NT 4.0, XP 2000 etc) is a hybrid Kernel anyway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel

Like Linus says it's just a bunch of marketing hype.

Accroding to wikipedia, Vista still uses the NT Kernel...

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2006/04/25/application-compatibility-in-vista.html

I've had a read of that article seems to allay my fears a bit. I'll definately have to look into it deeper though
Logged

The Cosmic Fool

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #22 on: 16 Mar 2007, 21:25 »

Yeah, you're probably right. Well, I guess we'll find out in 6 months to a year how Vista is going to pan out in the long run. Certainly not worth $400 for Ultimate Extras though, that's for sure.
Logged

nihilist

  • Guest
Re: Vista
« Reply #23 on: 17 Mar 2007, 12:50 »

Personally, I want to see an MS OS based on Singularity.  That'd allow them to cut the whole backward compatibility BS that those poor fuckers have to deal with.
Logged

Catfish_Man

  • Pneumatic ratchet pants
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 369
    • Assorted Stuff
Re: Vista
« Reply #24 on: 19 Mar 2007, 00:32 »

Heh. It'd also break so many expectations users have built up ("whaddya MEAN plugins aren't allowed??!"*) that they'd have a hard time selling it. Neat OS though.


*or at least they have to run as external processes; perhaps programmers could adapt to that successfully...
Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up